part 129, or "with love, TTFN"

I have been feeling better and better about so many things. This past year has really yielded a lot of hope for me. For the first time in my life, I am facing an existence free of constant reminders of what I have done and what others have done to me. I am getting closer and closer to leaving this hell hole behind, and having my own life to live in a place I can call home.

As things have been falling into place these past few months, I am feeling less compelled to write in this blog. Don't get me wrong - I have been writing on my new anonymous blog, and have also written a short story I will be submitting to a contest. I am excited about how my writing has evolved from something I was compelled to do into an experience I sincerely enjoy.

The short story contest I am entering has made me realize that I can write short stories and enter them into contests in a relatively simple and inexpensive manner. Blogging has gotten me to the point of accessing my emotions deeply enough to put them into words in 1,000 to 1,500 word instalments, and then continue to function in the present. That's pretty much what short stories are, right?

I used to read my blogs...it was so strange seeing my thoughts and feelings and pain and torture and growth all laid out in a public diary. Every now and then, I would start from my first post and read every entry to that date. I stopped doing this after about twenty posts, though, because that is a lot to read and I already know what it says, so what is really the point?

I also have gotten to a place where I can write about all of this shit, post it online, and leave it behind. I have gradually stopped ruminating about every detail I have revealed about myself and my experiences, and learned to just spit out whatever it is that has been pressing my mind, and then let go of it and appreciate the relief from a little bit more darkness.

I cannot express how important this blog has been to me, and to my recovery. Beyond the catharsis of getting my troubles out of my head, I have thrived on the encouragement of people I had not spoken to in decades, and acquaintances revealing their similar grief, and complete strangers letting me know my words made them feel stronger. It has truly been a miraculous gift.

I have made so much progress since I have started putting it all out there, but it has been about only one facet of my life. I know I have mentioned that there were other things my dad did, and that I witnessed and experienced, but have not been able or willing to share any of that with the world. My obsessions and fixations have gradually come to center around these other events, and images, and feelings, and horrors. I think that is largely due to the fact that I have been keeping them all so close to me, and not setting them free into cyberspace.

This is where my anonymous blog comes in. In many ways, writing in that blog is like starting over again, like I have to go through the same processes with these other things that I did with what I wrote about here. It is really difficult. I have the time and the space and the stamina and the ability to make that effort, though. This blog has gotten me to this point.

So I guess this would be a good place to leave this tome of misery and hope, just as I am leaving behind the initial recovery phase and so much of the pain of my past. It is time to move on.

So, um, yeah.

Thank you readers, for giving me this opportunity to heal. I am eternally grateful to you, the recipients of the angst and joy of the past few years. Thank you for helping me to love who I am, and I have every hope that each of you are loving who you are, too.

<3 class="goog-spellcheck-word" span="span">Rebecca

Part 128, or "its time to throw down"

I had therapy yesterday, and as soon as I got settled in, I told my therapist that I feel really good and like I don't really need to talk about anything. Of course, I knew as I was saying those words that something would come up that I needed to talk about.

One thing I found myself surprised to express in that session was how difficult this has all been. I feel now that I am in the light at the end of the tunnel, and I can finally get back to (or start) living my life. Where I am right now is what gave me hope the whole time I was working toward it. I haven't gotten here in the way I thought it would happen, and it has taken a hell of a lot longer to get here than I could have even comprehended.

I think if I knew how long it would take to get me where I am now, I may not have even started the journey. If I knew the pain and drudgery and horror the past six years would bring before it all started, I am sure I would be dead now, because I don't think I would have continued to choose this route. This route has fucking sucked.

And I know I am writing about it in the past tense; I do not for a moment think my life is going to be all shits and giggles from here on out, but I finally have a solid experience to proclaim is behind me. Six years ago (or was it seven?), I was tormented by a desperation I didn't even really know existed. I don't feel desperate anymore. I don't feel beholden to the past or to whether or not anyone else believes what I have to say. 

I don't understand how it is that I got this far, though. I mean, I understand the pain and agony of living this process...but I don't understand how someone so keenly pressed into a lifepath of misery and shame could have possibly been re-routed to where I am now. I was raised to hate myself, and to hate other people. My earliest directions were to have pain, to be hurt and hurt other people. I was taught from birth that hate and shame comprised the entity that is me. 

Where I am now does not happen often in the world, and I am actually quite shocked that my parents failed to make me into a snivelling imp. They were very talented and astute at turning a child's reality into a pit of writhing vipers. I mean, as far as brainwashing goes, my parents were the best. I would not have been surprised if, given positions of huge power, my parents were lumped into history with Charles manson and Hitler. 

In fact, I have specifically studied Hitler because he reminds me of my dad, and learning about his personality and actions and habits was very familiar to me. At the time it was exciting, but now I find the minds of charismatic sociopaths to be boring. They all seem to be very similar in a very rudimentary way, and that is all there is to them: a bag of tricks and snake oil, and the ability to peddle it to people who have desperation living in them, and there are a lot of people who fit that description.

This is not to say I am not terrified of sociopaths, because I am - body and soul terrified. They are very dangerous people who are very talented at hurting others, and who have only a longing for hurting others. Talent with a coinciding motivation is what greatness is built on. Whether or not the greatness is positive or negative is not really relevant.

But I have always been terrified, and I believe it is unchangeable. I will probably feel terrified for the rest of my life. But the thing about terror is, since I have been on such intimate terms with it for so long, it does not pose as much as a threat or hurdle as it used to - not psychologically, anyway. I believe it will be very difficult for anyone to intimidate me intellectually. I have mastered the art of bullshit, and now it has no power over me! Well, not very much power anyway.

When a manipulator's greatest weapon is fear, and I am already scared anyway, it takes some wind out of the manipulator's sails - what the fuck are they going to do? Scare me some more? The more scared I get doesn't affect my ideals and values so much anymore, so scare me all day long - no one can do anything worse to me than what has already been done, and I got through all of it the first time, so...yeah. 

Fear is the number one motivator. Its what money and power and religion and politics are all about, but in my recognition and acceptance of my own constant terror, and by allowing the whole world to see it all, I am finding myself free as a bird.

So, yeah, if you want to beat the shit out of me, I will definitely run away from you. But if you want to fuck with my head, good luck with that. My head has transcended the power of getting fucked with. The power in that is not that I am a threat to anyone else, or that I want to scare people or hurt people with my perspective, it just means that I am not going to automatically submit to anything I feel is in any way tainted with bullshit. I am free as long as I am completely honest, and honesty is not nearly as painful as being raped by my own parents, so I think I am going to stick with the honesty.

I do keep feeling uncomfortable using such terms of finality and confidence. I know it is possible - and that it most likely will happen - that I will get sucked into some bullshit and get my head fucked with again. It is a part of life.

But now I have the most amazing armor against bullshit, and I feel so much safer being in the real, live world. The world really has so much beauty, and I am very pleased to be able to see it clearly, without my fear holding me back.

Going back to whether or not I would have chosen this route if I had known what it was going be like, I do know that I would still go this way. All I have do is think a moment about what it felt like at the beginning, and I know I would choose this route again. But this route has still fucking sucked.

part 127, or "post-op...alyptic"

So it turns out all of my guts had grown together, and that had to be all cleaned up during the surgery for my hysterectomy. Aside from taking much longer than had originally been anticipated, the procedure went very well, and I am very pleased with the progress of my recovery. Enough about my guts, though - I mean they are guts, and the surgeon didn't find anything interesting in them (like a twin, or human teeth, or a colony of worms), so that's that.

I apparently prepared for the emotional and psychological aspects of the hysterectomy well. I haven't had any emotional or hormonal fallout at all. It feels a lot like when my dad died, like losing such a significant part of myself would have been devastating if it was happeneing to any one else, but it is happening to me, so it is just a big relief.

I feel good. I am really feeling the symbolic and literal and spiritual parrallels of everything going on in my life. It seriously just feels really good.

One thing that has been on my mind a lot is my mom, and how different the circumstances would have been if she was still a part of my life. I am really relieved I did not have to deal with her making my surgery all about her, or making light of my experience, or judging my decisions about very major things in my life. I also am glad I did not have to keep track of all the people who wished me well and wanted to be a part of the superficial aspects of the healing process, like my brother and sister, and my mom's friends.

I realize how snooty and disaffected that might sound, but it is like when anyone uses the phrase "well, bless her heart!" It is a contrived reaction to something bad happening to someone you don't really give a shit about, but you don't want anyone to know you don't give a shit about the person something bad is happening to. Then there is the obligation on the part of the person whose heart is being blessed to acknowledge how wonderful and thoughtful and gracious the heart-blesser is, or dire social consequences will follow. It is all very old-money and Southern. I hate it.

I also am glad that I don't have to deal with justifying to my mom the validity of my hysterectomy. When I was a kid, one of my aunts had a hysterectomy. Up until then, I had been under the impression that a hysterectomy was something devastasting and terrible, that having one meant you were forever disfigured and marked as "less than," and were one to be pitied. When my aunt had her hysterectomy, though, my mom was really irritated about it all. My mom said that my aunt was making a big deal out of normal things, and that she just wanted the attention a valid hysterectomy may have warranted.

She was the same way about a family that were our close friends, swearing the mom had Munchausen's by proxy, and had imposed imaginary bad things on her daughters so that hysterics and surgeries and conditions and fears of infertility were a constant part of their lives. Now those the daughters are all grown up, and it turns out one of them is not able to have children, and after my own experiences, I really resent my mom's way of invalidating other people's pain and hardship.

So I guess what I learned from my mom is that hysterectomies are horrible and devastating and life changing IF the person having it did not somehow bring it upon herself by pretending to be sicker than she really was. Otherwise, it was just another "bless her heart" on the outside, and then talking shit about feigned symptoms and histrionics behind closed doors. I am glad I didn't have to submit myself as fodder for either of those categories, especially since I was actually really excited about how much better I might feel after a hysterectomy. I mean, I don't feel any need to be pitied or condescended to, and frankly have not been.

My aunt, and our family friend and her daughters, were on the "I'm super crazy, look at me" end of the bless-her-heart spectrum, and I did always view them as being somehow insincere in the way they went about their lives. Like something was wrong with them, like their feelings and thoughts were to all be discounted because somewhere in it all is a big pile of steaming dog shit - pretty much the way my mom presented me to the world.

I did not want to be like those crazy self-absorbed people, even if in reality they were much nicer to me than my mom was, because going to all kinds of different lengths to call attention to yourself was the worst kind of person there was. In hindsight, I would call that a complete absence of compassion, and having no compassion is the lonliest way to live. I wonder how lonely my mom feels on a moment to moment basis.

Before I wrote about my aunt who had a hysterectomy, I thought about how my doing so could be contrived as stiring shit up, "sewing discord among [sisters]," and basically calling my mom out for being such a petulent bitch her whole life. Will my aunt read this post and realize that her pain and trauma were the butt end of my mom's disdain? Maybe. Am I intentionally attempting to interefere with whatever intact relationships my mom has at this time in her sad little life? Maybe. Am I being a spiteful little bitch? Maybe.

But do I give a shit if my motives are insincere and non-therapeutic and simply petulant, like my mom's motives so often are? No.

But if I don't give a shit about that, does that mean I am taking a great risk by leaving my viewpoints and conclusions vulnerable to dismissal by others? If my viewpoints and conclusions are dismissed by others, does that mean they are not valid?

Who gives a fuck?

My mom is a cunt. FYI, that has nothing to do with the topic at hand, but I really just felt like calling her that.

Having the hysterectomy behind me makes me feel clean, and strong, and capable. Perhaps paradoxically, it gives me a keener sense of my femininity, of my place in the world as a woman, and of my ability to know what it is to have respect for myself.

On a different note, I am done with school. I am not officially graduating, but I am done. As disappointing as it was to let that goal of being a college graduate go, especially after all of the time and money and energy I have put into it, I feel really good about this, too. Having the piece of paper does not mean to me now as much as it did when I started school seven years ago. Also, it is very easy for me to see that all of that time and money and effort actually do mean something - my failure to get a diploma does not dismiss the abundance of knowledge and self-worth that I have acquired along the way.

By redefining my perception of what being a college graduate means to me, am I making excuses to justify throwing in the towel? I don't fucking know.

What I do know is that I am tremendously excited about having so much time to write! I am espeially excited about a new project I am doing anonymously, about all of the things I have been scared to reveal in this blog, where people know me, and can use the information I publish here as a means of judging me. Also, where it would be easier for others to be hurt by what I have to say. I am excited to put all of this other stuff out there without the burden of identity.

I don't know if anyone will read my new anonymous blog (I probably won't be advertising it), or if they will believe what I write there. It really is so tremendously fucked up, even more fucked up than what I have revealed in this blog. But I recently found a quote by Maya Angelou: "There is no greater burden than bearing an untold story inside of you." It is so, so, so true, but now I have a means of unburdening myself of those other stories!

Unforunately, I cannot reveal my new anonymous blog here, you know, because it is anonymous. But I am certainly going to continue posting here - writing this blog has been my life blood these past few years, and I have grown accustomed to having life in my blood. So now, while continuing to maintain the strength I have built up for myself, I am starting a new chapter - perhaps even a new life - with my uterus-less body, and enough college credit hours for four different bachelor's degrees (but not even a single actual degree), and with my physical and mental health, and with my beautiful husband and sons, and - miracle of all miracles - with peace of mind.

Seriously, it feels really good.

Part 126, or "the clermont lounge"

So it is already the 13th, and I have not posted anything this month. A big part of that is my inability to type efficiently on my tablet, but I am figuring it out.

Another big part is that I have been largely processing the same shit I wrote about in my last post, and it is really painful to think about, and to feel those feelings, and to live so closely with the reality of it, and writing about it just makes it more real. I guess I've had to shore up a bit before l could start moving again.

Things have gotten much easier in a lot of ways over the past month. There has been such a tremendous diminishing of stress - its been fantastic. Unfortunately, I have just been so exhausted all of the time. My mind is all excited about going out in the world and living life, but my body is all like, "dude, hang on a second." It is the complete opposite of what I have been accustomed to.

I am relieved to know that I do have to have surgery to remove my gimpy uterus. I am done with it, anyway, and the idea of not feeling constant pain, and of having more energy, is so exciting!

There are many emotional aspects of having my uterus removed that I am kind of worried about. I wonder if I will feel a great sense of loss, or if my hormones will be going crazy. I keep thinking about when I was 17 and had an ovarian cyst, and I went into surgery thinking the cyst would be removed laproscopically, and then waking up to learn that I had a new six inch incision across my abdomen, and one less ovary. It was very devastating.

But then I think about where I was in my life then, how I was still in that treacherous prison of childhood, and had no way to empower myself. My mind is a much different place now. I think I may feel some loss at part of my body being removed from me, but also relief. It is happening at a very metamorphic stage in my life, and it is like the pain of the past is going to be symbolically removed from me when they take out my uterus.

It is really so literary, the symbolism of it all. My uterus representing my feminity, how it was invaded and distorted by vile intrusions before my first conscious memories even began to take shape. Also how it was the stage for that little speck of my dad to intertwine with that littke speck that was me, and where an entirely different monster-girl was created, and then removed, both processes largely involving my dad.

And then my own babies were created and sheltered and protected in the very same place. It is so strange to think of the vast distinctions of purity and violation and beauty and devastation that have taken place all inside the tiny baby sack in my abdomen. My uterus is the Clermont Lounge of my body, and the time has come for demolition, and for removing the old, both good and bad, and creating space for something new. A new space that is just for me.

It reminds me of how it will never be impossible for me to see my mom's face in my mirror, or how it will never be possible to deny that my dad was the person who taught me how to read. My parents gave me ways to access the beauty in life. That is still the hardest part to understand, that my parents are people who gave me so much, but are the same people who withheld and took so much from me. They taught me how to live while simultaneously showing me how to die.

They were my greastest blessings and greatest enemies at the same time, kind of like how my uterus was a place for my beautiful children to become alive, but also was a place that held and protected that tiny innocent beast that was the beginning of my father's child.

I have to say that incest is one of the single most diabolical acts in this life. It is the greatest of all mindfuckers, and the most efficient producer of shame. It is devastation in a bottle, fed to humans who have no choice but to trust. The inability to distinguish love from hate is what hell is like, and a child knowing what hell is like before knowing what riding a bike is like is tragic.

Incest is a tragedy. The only thing I can imagine worse than being a victim of incest is being a perpetrator of incest. Actually, that is not true - being manipulated and forced to perpetrate incestuous acts on others is also worse than being the victim...maybe even worse than being the master instigator. Not being able to distinguish within one's own self the difference between being a victim and being a perpetrator is just as bad as not being able to distinguish the difference between love and hate in someone your existance relies on.

So profound today!

A few days ago, one of my doctors told me that I was a great healer for my family, and I asked her why she thought so, and she said that whoever is able to heal from something gains the ability to heal others. I liked that a lot, because it allowed me to recognize how significant my healing has been, and that it is time to move toward a new part of my life.

The part where I don't have a uterus.

P.S. attempts to demo the Clermont Lounge, to the best of my knowledge, have failed.

part 125, or "I guess it really is what it is"

***Kind of a trigger warning. It triggered me, anyway***

The first time I started this post was about two weeks ago. It hurts very much. It’s really been bothering me – I’m very irritated that I haven’t posted it yet. At this point, the only reason I am posting it is because it might make me feel better about the whole situation. That has worked with things I’ve written about before; it’s why I keep writing and posting on this blog.

But this...fuck. It is ROUGH. I’m very much remembering how I felt at the time this happened. I remember being in the front yard, stuck because I wanted to go somewhere ELSE, but across the street is where I was violently raped, and I was too scared to go there much anymore, even though those boys that lived there – my best friends, the sons of the bastard that raped me in theri basement - were what I needed at that time.

I had stopped mid stride in the grass, with one foot pointing across the street, but my face turned back to look at the big bay window of the kitchen – where my mom did that to me – and I was so fucking angry.

I was stuck.

I still know how that house smells, and that the ceilings look like, and the size of the closet under the stairs, which was one of my favorite places there. I remember what it was like to stand in the rooms, to lay down on the couch and read for hours, to be so relieved to find no one home after school, and I think again about her –my mom.

Why did she do that to me? Why?

Even if I feel like I cognitively understand why, my chest hurts so bad, and my heart is breaking apart, and all I can do is stand there frozen in the front yard and look back at the kitchen window, and my brain is so overcome with pain that I can’t make sense of anything at all.

It was the worst – what she did to me was the worst. After all the things my dad did, and other people did, all of the torture and rape and being the star of kiddie porn, what my mom did to me was the worst.

Before she did that to me, I at least had HER. I had some anchor that I was only subconsciously aware of, a foundation for my sanity – she’s my MOM. She’s my fucking MOM.

And in that moment, any inkling of security I had left was ripped away from me, and I had absolutley no idea what to do.

Oh my god, it HURTS!!!! It hurts so bad, remembering what it felt like to lose those last remnants of my sanity, and to feel it all float away, and I remember what it felt like for all of it to float away, and from then on, it was all just so blurry.

It was just all a screamingly desperate attempt to not know that she did that to me, and the anger really set in, and stayed there and festered for the next fifteen years.

Anyway, I am posting this shit now. I’ve had a good cry, the real kind, where everything in me feels like it is going to implode, and tears flow out from eyes, and insteard of the anger and hatred, I just feel pain.

Here’s the original begining of this post:

Yesterday I had this thing where I vivdly relived the time that my mom raped me. I actually had not even thought of it as rape until just now. Even as I am writing the word, and knowing that what she did to me is, by definition, rape, I keep double checking the reality of the concept.

What she did to me is very similar to what the rapist guy did when I was fifteen on superbowl sunday. It took a lot of cognitive analysis to finally recognize that as rape, and I can't deny now that what my mom did to me was the same thing.

Jesus. I don't like thinking about rape this early in the morning. I especially don't like thinking about my mom raping me at all. I suppose I really don't like thinking about rape at all, either, but my stomach in the morning is so fragile. I mean, I am nauseous right now. It reminds me of elementary school.

So anyway, I don't want to think about it, but it was a really significant and intense experience yesterday, and I feel quite compelled  to write about it.

It was one of those times that I really relived the experience, except that I was still aware that I was here, today, and that allowed me to respond to my mom now in a way I wasn't able to then. I even talked out loud to her. Talking out loud in this remembering type of situation, even when I know for certain that no one can hear me, is really scary for me. I have such a fear of being overheard, or watched, or whatever.

I found out recently that people with avoidant personality disorder have an extreme fear of anyone seeing them blushing, and I wonder if this is the same type of fear I have about being overheard talking out loud to people in my past memories.

So anyway, I felt good about being brave enough to talk to that memory of my mom out loud.

******

I started this post three days ago. I'm scared to post it.

My mom raped me.

I don't even like thinking about it. Why would I write it in a fucking blog?

I am back to being afraid of what she might think or do if I post it, and also being afraid of what my brother and sister might say.

I'm not afraid in a concrete way - it is more like the girl in my brain is afraid of being abandoned or ostrasized or shamed or ridiculed.

But I am not the same girl now, and I have already been shamed and ridiculed and ostrasized and disowned, so what am I afraid of? What's left to scare me? 

It's the reality of it. If I say that my mom raped me, then I have to think - did my mom rape me? Then I go back to all of the ways that what my mom did to me constitutes rape. I keep running out of any other answer than:

My mom raped me.

part 124, or "accessories sold separately"

I was just re-reading my last post, about my dad and evil, and I realized that I had witnessed (and written about in my last post) my dad before he was totally dead inside.

I know that mental illness left untreated is usually a gradual process to madness, but for some reason, I have only thought of my dad as completely bad; completely evil; completely soulless. He wasn’t always like that, though.

Sometimes there would be a light shining in him. It was always very brief, and I remember feeling very uncomfortable by how vulnerable he was allowing himself to be. It was like he was flashing his soft underbelly in a world I believed was filled with daggers.

It seemed as though he was incredibly awkward in a lot of ways, socially speaking. He didn’t really have a good lead on what other people thought was normal, and he would make inappropriate jokes and remarks, and then look embarrassed and cease talking when no one laughed or otherwise validated him. He only seemed confident and comfortable around people who were afraid or in awe of him.

That is just one more thing I can completely relate with, though. I guess me and my dad really were a lot alike.

My brother insists he is nothing like my dad – he’s terrified of being my dad, which is silly, because half of his genetic makeup is my dad, whether my brother wants to acknowledge that or not. It’s funny, because I always felt my dad was terrified of becoming HIS dad – it’s why he would insist on saying that he loved us every day, because his dad never said that to him ever.

My dad spoke less and less of his dad as years went by. I mean, he hardly ever mentioned him at any time, but I do remember him bringing up his dad when I was younger, and then not doing that as I got older. He would talk about technical things concerning his dad, like what he did for work and stuff like that. I don’t remember my dad ever really being emotional about his dad. Actually, I don’t remember my dad ever being emotional about anything.

I saw him cry once. It was when he and my mom reconciled after their separation when I was in the 5^th grade. They were in the bed talking, and then they called the three of us into their room, and told us that they weren’t going to get divorced, and we all climbed in the bed and cried together.

I wasn’t shocked to see tears dripping down my dad’s cheeks, but I was struck by how unusual it was, and I knew I had never seen him cry before, and I don’t think I ever saw him cry since then. It was all very weird and emotional, and I felt very much that our family was one unit, and that we were each part of it, and that we were all working together for the best of us all.

That was a fleeting moment, but it was real – it did happen.

I’m not trying to say that sadistic sociopaths never cry, or are incapable of crying – I know people can tear up and start crying on cue as a means to manipulate other people.

But I don’t think my dad was doing that the time I saw him cry.

There were times, too, when he would look at me, at my face and my eyes, and tell me how much he loved me, and that I was special to him, and he would bear hug me, and I would feel happy and safe for a moment. I believe in those tiny pieces of my childhood, that my dad really did love me.

I really loved him, too.

I have this odd, off-kilter feeling about the role my dad has played in my life, as far as the role of “my dad” goes. There were certain expectations I had of him that would fit into the “normal dad” category. Sometimes I would forget who he was, and who I was, and start to feel safe leaning on him as “my dad.” It was a nice feeling.

I wonder if that is how it feels to have a dad who doesn’t hurt you, and who wants to keep you safe. It seems like it would be so solid, so comforting, to have that faith in a parent. I can’t imagine – I can’t comprehend – what it would be like to feel that all the time, to never doubt that it was real.

I’ve written before about seeing other dads with their daughters, and feeling puzzled and foreign and grateful and envious that these daughters had dads who made them smile and laugh and feel safe. I have been recognizing that I did have that feeling with my dad, as frail and eluding as it was.

Losing that feeling of safety hurt so bad – it was devastating. It was ice picks through my gut, and cement in my lungs, but I was a sucker for getting a taste of that feeling. I don’t think always, though. I denied my dad my trust and confidence and faith regularly – turned my back when he was trying to show me a nice part of him.

But when I didn’t turn my back on him, those times when he gave me the feeling that he was “my dad” were heavenly. For a moment, I believed that I actually was like the little girls in commercials playing with Barbi dolls and riding bikes and doing mischievous little girl things that dads acted upset about, but actually really endeared them to their girls all the more.

Those girls were their dad’s girls.

Those dads looked at those girls and said, not matter what was going on, “that’s my little girl. That’s my baby girl, my beautiful, amazing baby girl, and I would gladly kill anyone who might have the gall to hurt her.”

At those times, I could see that my hair was smooth and shiny and had cute bows or barrettes in it, and my clothes were so pretty, and everything I wore matched perfectly with the bows and barrettes, and the lace around the ankles of my socks would match, too. My room would be pink or purple, and have matching curtains and comforter and pillow shams, and a bed skirt, and – dream of all dreams – a canopy over the bed.

I always imagined it would feel nice to sleep with a canopy over me – not enclosing me or entrapping me, but just protecting me from the world by shielding me with floating pastel banners.

But then “my dad” would just be my dad again, and it would all crash down onto me again, get jerked away from me, and I would be ugly again, with ugly clothes and ugly shoes and not one single pair of socks with lace around the ankles, and not one single Barbi doll, which I didn’t want anyway, because what fun were Barbi dolls if it was too freakishly weird to introduce Barbi to Ken and make them have sex on that goddamn pink canopy bed?

part 123, or "like a box of chocolates"

(Note: I keep trying to re-read and polish this up for publishing, but my brain keeps getting all soupy from the content; as far as it making any sense, you're on your own)

My dad was a sadist. He loved to hurt people in innovative ways. Actually, he loved to imagine hurting people in innovative ways. Once the actual act of hurting someone became a part of the real world, during the time he was doing the hurting, his mind retreated. Any part of him that was human shrank back into an almost-oblivion as his body inflicted the pain.

And then he would come back, and see and think about he had done, and he would be horrified - but only for a second, maybe less. Once he came back into his mind, the knowledge that he had hurt someone in such a brutal way was the worst pain he had ever felt. It devastated him. So he only kept it in his brain fleetingly, and would not have felt it at all, but he didn't have a choice, because he was not completely dead inside.

The part of him that was not dead lived in a nightmare. It was stuffed down so deeply inside of him, and coated all around with thick layers of apathy. Most of the time he couldn't feel it, or have to think about it, but it was still there.

He hated it. He hated the part of him that would not die. I don't think he started out hurting people so that he could kill what was alive in himself, but that is what it eventually became. Each time he did something horrific, the alive part of him would scream, and he would remember what it felt like to feel. He would remember that he was not completely evil - there still resided a bit of innocence in him.

So he would try harder to prove to himself that he really was completely evil. This is how things escalated, how his methods of torture evolved. Initially, he simply loved how it felt to hurt someone (or something). He had been hurt so much by people and places bigger than him, and the realization that he could hurt things smaller than himself made him feel strong. Like cocaine. It made him feel like he could take on everyone in the world, and he truly believed that it would happen someday, and that he would not be afraid of anyone, and everyone would be afraid of him.

I can relate to this. My big problem, though, is that I have not been able to kill nearly as much of my alive self as my dad. As a child, he had much more time left alone to harm other things - when he was a kid, from a very young age, he would wander around, and to get the pain of isolation and rejection out of his mind and body, he would search out creatures he could hurt. And then he would hurt them, and he would feel better - or at least feel less, because he was killing a tiny bit of his alive self with every act of pain inflicted on another being.

When he was young, he loved the thrill of it, and how the thrill would completely shut out his own pain. But he began to get indifferent to it - he was gaining a tolerance to the pain he inflicted on others, and it wasn't working for him after a while, and he had to inflict more and more pain on others in order to get rid of only a drop of his own pain. Like cocaine.

By the time I came around, he was still able to cancel out some of his pain by hurting others, but when I was born, he gained a completely defenseless being, completely within his power, to hurt. Game ON.

My dad, I believe, felt that he was abused because it was part of the process of becoming "better than." I know he hated his dad, and his brother, but could not comprehend that they would hurt him simply for their own sadistic pleasures. I used to be very sure that my grandfather thought he was god, too, or a prophet or something, and that he passed this on to my dad. I think my grandfather was actually just completely nuts, but his indoctrination in a religious cult is where he got his god-superiority from.

I have tried to tie my grandfather's and father's failed attempt to castrate me to something that makes some sort of sense, even if it is a crazy sort of logic. But it's not logical at all. I thought of it as a ritual, again part of the process to make me the next generation of superiority. Maybe I have not been able to comprehend that my father and grandfather would just do that to me simply for their own sadistic pleasure.

My abuse has always been so heavily shrouded in religion that I am only just now realizing that it may have all been just madness, that religion and superiority may have been superficial normalizations for such horrendous behavior, but that none of it ever actually clicked together.

Maybe I have been seeing the generational "superiority" as my dad's motivation to hurt me because I can't comprehend that he was a straight-up crazy dude who liked to do incredibly sick and damning things to me.

My dad really did eventually come to believe he was god. I don't think it was all aimless madness - he definitely had a linear frame of mind, albeit outside the realm of reality. But it was real to him - that's where his shitty childhood and his being a cowardly little bitch drove him to. Being god was the only conclusion that he found appropriate as an answer to all of the shit he suffered, and to all of the shit he did to other people. I mean, only non-human types of beings could have been the victim and predator of what my dad experienced, and the only non-human beings he was taught existed were god and satan.

He saw everyone who tried to "get in his way" or to "destroy" him as satan, so the only thing left for him to be was god.

I don’t know.

I really do think my dad's brainwashing me to think I was some sort of godling is what ended up holding my mind together; it gave me strength to not give in to killing myself, literally and figuratively.

Part of my parents' façade was the use of religion to hide their evil. They had to do enough for me to appear as good parents. Except that the good in my life was not a ruse to me; to me, it was real. Maybe that's why the part of me that is alive hasn't been quieted.

Regardless, my dad very gradually glided from the pain of loss and rejection to the appearance of complete apathy. I don't know if he succeeded in killing his alive self completely before his physical self died, but if there was any of him left alive the last couple of times I saw him, I could not see it. If there was any life left in him, it was the root of misery and despair - he simply had no access to it, though he had no way of completely extinguishing it. Just KNOWING, somewhere deep in his body and mind, that he did have an element of recognizing that what he was doing was horrifically evil, and any glimpse of the evil in himself was the embodiment of suffering.

I don't know how I know these things about my dad. I just know that I do. I have had a very difficult time resolving that my knowledge of evil is different from being evil. But as I get more familiar with the person I really am, the more I am able to use my knowledge of evil as a tool to make the world a better place. Or at least a safer place.

That knowledge of evil, though, has come from hurting others - the things I have done to other people (granted, primarily at the behest and coercion of my dad), are tremendously difficult to live with. I guess I am fortunate that I have figured out a way to live with it without indulging myself in it as a means of becoming numb to my own pain.

I guess I'm just lucky that way.

part 122, or "reality bites"

***TRIGGER ALERT***

I had a doctor’s appointment yesterday. It was just a routine thing, but it was with a new doctor.

I don’t like going to the doctor – any doctor - but one of the things I have been learning to do is take better care of myself, and that means going to the doctor for routine stuff.

Anyway, I was not at all expecting to experience a doctor’s appointment like the one I ended up having yesterday. I was expecting routine questions and routine answers and routine tests and routine results. But this wasn’t a routine doctor.

After she learned some of my history, she started asking questions I wasn’t really sure how to answer…wait, let me back it up. I was there for my routine checkup, but also for a consult about a tubal ligation. She asked me why I was afraid of becoming pregnant – not why I did not want to have any more kids, but why I was AFRAID OF BECOMING PREGNANT.

I told her about my dad, and the abortion when I was 15 that was the result of his raping me. I told her I hadn’t started remembering things about the rapes and abortion until after my second child was born, and that the idea of being pregnant again terrified me because I felt like I would have to remember how it felt to be pregnant with my father’s child.

She asked me what I had felt when my dad raped me. I literally did not understand the question. I kept trying to specify whether or not she was asking me how I felt psychologically or physically, and she kept saying she just wanted to know how it felt.

I hadn’t really thought of that in any cognitively processing kind of way before. How DID it feel when my dad was raping me? When he forced himself onto me and into me, and injected me with himself, and it mixed with myself, and a whole new entity that was the combination of me and my dad was created in my body?

I couldn’t answer the question – I still really couldn’t understand the question. Whenever I tried to think of how that felt, when he was doing that to me, I just shut down. My brain automatically threw up a line and designated it as the line to never cross, and when I faced the possibility of crossing it anyway, I just wanted to throw up or lie down on the floor and go to sleep or leave there and go to the nearest bar and get shit faced.

But she insisted I cross that line, even after I told her my brain shut down. She said that shutting down was not allowed.

And so I thought about it, what it felt like.

It felt awful. It felt heavy, and it felt like getting ripped open, and it stung. And it felt shocking – even though he had been doing it since before I could even really remember, every time he did it again, I was shocked that it was happening. I wouldn’t stay there – I would leave into my mind when he was doing it.

Sometimes he would talk to me when he was raping me, and it was harder for me to stay inside my mind. He would ask me questions about how it felt. He would tell me I was such a good daughter for going along with it – that it was the hardest part of being a daughter, but I was such a good daughter for doing it.

He would tell me what he was feeling, what he was doing – he would describe it to me, and say that was how men worked, it was what men did, and I couldn’t understand that unless he showed me because I would never be a man.

He was teaching me.

He was punishing me.

He was dominating me.

He was hurting me.

He was showing me the only thing my body would ever be worth, that the only reason I had a heart beating inside of me was to fuel that body for him to use, and that the only reason I had two legs was so that I could open them up for him.

He injected me with himself, and when I found out I was pregnant, I was horrified at what kind of monster I carried in my body – what kind of monster the combination of him and me made.

I knew he was a monster, and I knew that I was a monster, too – at my core, that was who I was. Just like him.

And no combination of monster and monster could be anything other than a super monstrous monster. Would this baby monster get born and grow up and hurt people and kill people and torture people? Would it hurt me and torture me and kill me?

I worried that he would not pay for an abortion, that he would not be willing to destroy such an opportunity – the opportunity of having a concentrated version of his flesh and blood walking around, made purer because I was also his flesh and blood walking around, and I was the other half of this new flesh and blood.

He didn’t try to stop me. He didn’t refuse to pay for the abortion and he did not refuse to take me there to have it done.

What he did refuse to do was acknowledge that he had done this to me. It seemed like it never actually hit his reality that I was pregnant with a monster that he had put inside of me – he told me I was a slut, and from that I knew he was saying to me that someone else got me pregnant – there was no acknowledgment whatsoever that he knew he did that to me. That is what got me mad- really mad.

I wanted to reach in a take that tiny monster out with my own hands, but I couldn’t do it –  I couldn’t reach, and I didn’t know how it worked, and I was so, so scared. I punched it over and over, but I knew that wouldn’t work, and I had to tell him because he was the only one who could help me get rid of it.

And he did.

When I was pregnant with my own children, my brain didn’t know what it had felt like that time I was pregnant with the monster. But my body did. When I was pregnant with my own kids, I started throwing up the moment I found out I was pregnant, and didn’t stop until my own little babies were out of me.

I am grateful that I was able to have my own babies growing inside me without having to remember what it felt like having that tiny monster growing inside of me.

But now this doctor asked me what it felt like. I couldn’t hardly find words. I cried. She cried, too. She hugged me over and over again, and told me that my uterus was a beautiful part of my body, and that she did not recommend a tubal ligation because I had a condition that could be treated with a hysterectomy.

I hadn’t known all of the pain there had been from anything other than my own body’s memories – learning that there is actually something wrong with my uterus – and that it can be fixed by taking it out – was not something I had at all expected.

I also did not expect for a doctor to tell me that it was not an urgent procedure at this time, and that she did not want to do the surgery while I believed that getting rid of my uterus would mean getting rid of something bad – I told her that if I had never had a uterus, I would not have been raped over and over and sold to men I had never met before, and sold to men I lived across the street from and next door to, and I never would have had to be a good daughter to my dad.

I realized I hate my uterus, I hate that I was a girl then, and not a boy, because I would not have been hurt that way if I had been a boy.

And I hadn’t realized all of this until that doctor tipped my brain over and asked me what I felt when my dad was raping me, and what I imagined I would feel if I were to get pregnant again today.

She said she wanted me to work out that I didn’t need to have my uterus removed because it would make it easier for me to not have it in my body. If I needed to have it removed only because of a physical condition, then it could be done. But she didn’t want to do it when it was still a part of my body that I hated.

A lot to think about…and I wasn’t expecting any of that at all.

part 121, or "getting my nails done is not crazy"

Wanting to violently hurt someone else, to me, is pretty crazy. Not “weird” or “astounding” crazy, but CRAZY crazy, and I have always been terrified of being that kind of crazy.

I’ve lived my entire life not knowing if I was crazy or not. Its just in the past couple of years that I’ve gotten firm footing when it comes to how I view my mental state. I have done so many tests on myself, studying my own behavior and thoughts in reference to whatever is (or is not) going on around me at any given time. I’ve researched my sanity exhaustively, and it’s getting boring, because I’m not crazy.

Well, maybe a little bit crazy. I guess it depends on how I define “crazy.”

Here is what I think a crazy person looks like:

Wild hair, no make-up, eyes that are always seeing something terrifying (real or imagined), wearing jammies all day (even in public), and wandering helplessly lost through the library or grocery store or on the street, even when they have lived there for the past thirty years.

Crazy looks like someone who knows something, but can’t remember that they know it. Confused, bitchy, unpredictable, and inappropriate. If someone is standing in a store staring at the same thing without moving for ten minutes, that looks like crazy. If that someone is wearing jammies and has greasy, unwashed hair, and bits of polish on their nails left after they picked the rest of it off, then that person looks certifiably insane.

All of my ideas about what crazy looks like are rooted in my own behavior – I don’t know if I think I’m crazy because I have looked and acted that way, or if looking and acting that way is what defines me as crazy. Regardless, I cannot deny at least the appearance of what I feel defines crazy, at least some of the time, in my life. In fact, I go around picking my nail polish off all the time, even though when I see someone who is obviously mentally ill, and they have mostly-picked-off nail polish, I say, “note to self: stop picking off nail polish; it makes you look crazy.”

I guess recognizing the crazy in other people has allowed me to be more accepting of myself, and of my illness, and of what it means to be ill this way. The other day I walked out of a store with all of my newly purchased items falling out through a hole in the bottom of the bag, and I was completely oblivious to it, and another customer had to run out after me to stop me, and the girl who worked there picked up all of my stuff after me and brought it to me at my car, and I smiled and said, “thank you,” and she said, “there’s a hole in the bag, do you want me to get you another,” and I said, “no, that’s okay, I will just carry it holding the bottom instead of by the handles,” and she stared at me strangely, and for some (crazy) reason I thought she meant that the bag was ABOUT to break, and the items she picked up after me were things accidentally left out of the bag at checkout, and I didn’t put it all together until after I started unpacking the bag when I got home and saw there was a big hole in the bottom.

And then I thought to myself, “wow – I was acting really crazy in that store.” And then I though to myself, “eh, don’t be so hard on yourself – if you were acting crazy, it was because you kind of are a little bit, but only the kind of crazy that comes from what you’ve been through, and not the scary kind of crazy.”

Scary crazy is when someone knows what is going to happen in the future, who believes they have special powers, and who has unfailing confidence in everything they do, because they already know they are going to end up the victor at the end of it all. That was who my dad was, and his dad, and probably my brother. That’s the crazy I am terrified of being – it’s the crazy I’ve been battling all along.

I get confused between what hope feels like, and believing I absolutely know everything will turn out well in the end because I am a superior being. I guess it’s the difference between taking care of myself and waiting for myself to get taken care of.

Even by my own admission – and something I have been saying for years - I was always waiting for men in white jackets to come and take me away. I would say, “I’ve always been expecting men in white jackets to come and take me away, but they never did, so I finally had to send myself to the mental hospital, ha ha ha” (for some reason, I always found this funny, but now I’m not remembering why…).

Anyway!

 Seeing and accepting the damage that has been done to me has helped me learn to take care of myself instead of waiting to be taken care of. It’s kind of paradoxical, because it would seem that seeing and accepting the damage to my mind and body would reinforce that I am a victim. But I am figuring out that the difference between being a victim and being a survivor lies in my ability to stop looking around for people to come make things better so I wouldn’t have to deal with the pain myself.

What happened to me was not fair; it was not right; it was not okay; it was not my fault. And it HURTS – beyond what I imagine the depths of hell feel like, even if I don’t believe there is a hell (not outside of life on earth, anyway).

But not accepting the pain, and staving it off until someone comes along and makes it go away (aka, “denial”), means that it is impossible to be anything other than a victim. I can’t accept help from other people if I can’t acknowledge what I need help with.

But I have spent my entire life building a façade that says I am brilliant, I am beautiful, I am special, and I am thereby entitled to have my pain taken from me so that I can be left to bask unfettered in the glory that is me. I have stood by that façade, and sworn that it was real, and fought to defend it at all cost. I have put a lot of time and energy and effort and pride into maintaining that façade.

But it is still a façade.

I mean, yeah, I’m smart, but I’m not Einstein, and yeah, I’m pretty, but I’m not a super model. And yeah, I have a lot of really nice qualities that are valued by society, but not to the extent that I outshine everyone else and am entitled to have effortlessly what everyone else must work for.

A huge part of my struggles have concerned the fact that I haven’t ever gotten what I believed I was entitled to. My greatness has never been cosmically acknowledged by money or power or fame, and those are the essential components to proving my greatness to the world. Closing in on 40 years old, not having that proof really sucks – I mean, if I am not powerful and famous and rich by now, wouldn’t that mean that my greatness isn’t so great?

Um…yeah, probably.

But now I am falling in love with humanity, and with being human, and it feels so much better than fruitlessly touting greatness I do not possess. It feels sane. It feels real, and it feels safe. It’s really a pretty nice way to feel.

part 120, or "seriously? i STILL live here?"

DISCLAIMER: I DON’T EVEN OWN A GUN, AND EVEN IF I DID, I HAVE NO DESIRE TO ACTUALLY KILL OR HURT ANYONE, INCLUDING MYSELF AND THE PEOPLE WHO RAPED ME.

I had an “episode” last week that really scared me. I was trying to accept that I might never be able to leave this shitty town. The reason I was doing that is because if I can imagine the worst possible scenario and determine if I can live with it, then all the other possible scenarios are much less frightening.

The bad thing was that, this time, I was considering the idea that I cannot live with the worst possible scenario, and my mind just kind of took some loops and twirls, and I didn’t (or couldn’t) say anything for over an hour. I was out with Jonny when it happened, and I am really glad he was with me, because I don’t know if I would have been able to get myself home in that state.

All I could do was just sit there and cry. Not the wracking, heaving, gut-wrenching crying, but the kind where my face stays blank and the tears simply fall from my eyes like drops of water leaking from a sink.

I was stuck in this mode of trying to reconcile how I would be able to stay in this town, and the only thing I could come up with was getting a gun and killing my mom and her rapist, pedophiliac, enabling neighbors. That was the only solution I could come up with that made me feel calmer.

It was a lot like right before I went into the hospital (almost exactly five years ago! Time flies when you’re painstakingly reconstructing your own sense of reality), when all I could do to keep my mind from breaking completely was plan how I was going to kill my dad.

I started out writing about killing my dad – this was also when I was still drinking (a LOT), and I would journal the graphic details of what my dad’s blood would look like spreading in a puddle around his head after I bashed his skull in with a baseball bat. It is a very fuzzy time, and I have never re-read those journals, but I do remember focusing on the stain his blood would leave on my cement driveway, and how it would have to be pressure-washed to get rid of it, and how I was never going to pressure-wash it because I wanted it to help me remember he was gone.

This obsessing about how I was going to kill my dad went on and on and on, and eventually grew into a solid plan to kill my dad, and I couldn’t help from actually planning to do it, because it was the only way my mind would stop screaming. I mean, I was really, really drunk most of that time period, but alcohol is no match for the screaming my mind can dole out.

So I kept obsessing and planning to go kill my dad.

I feel very fortunate that I was able to go to the hospital instead of actually killing my dad, and he ended up kicking his own self off a few years after that when his evil heart exploded. I am truly grateful that I have a pic of my dead dad to remind me he is gone, instead of a blood stain on my driveway…and hatch marks on my prison cell wall.

Needless to say, the obsessing about killing my dad was ongoing and very intense and very real to me. This “episode” I experienced last week, however, only lasted about an hour, and then I went into my super-stressed-out-sleep mode, and when I woke up, I felt better.

The thing about this “episode” last week is that my brain did not stay fixated on how I was going to kill these assholes, and how peaceful it would feel once they were dead. My mind kept going back to my husband and my kids, and how shitty it would be if I went on a murder spree to make myself feel better, and then left them behind in the wake of madness and violence. Seriously – that would be a tremendously shitty thing for me to do, as a mom, a partner, and a person.

So I never got to the point in this latest episode when killing people was going to become a real thing for me – it stayed on the side of fantasy, and the reason I was just dripping tears out the whole time was because the rest of me remained in reality, thinking about how shitty it would be to bail on my husband and my kids by getting sent to prison for however long.

I didn’t recognize this until after I had my stress-overload-relief nap, when my head was cleared up again. When I did realize it, I felt a lot more confident (and relief) in my ability to reason in a manner that is most conducive to my own health, and to the welfare of my husband and kids.

With my dad, I didn’t have that. At all. Hence, the mental hospital, and the awesomeness of him dying on his own without my interference.

Side note: I had a hard time deciding whether or not I would even write about this – I mean, the shit’s crazy. End side note.

I look back at the things that have changed, and the factors in my life that are very different now than when I went in the hospital, and I realized that I am probably going to be dealing with the effects of my experiences for the rest of my life, but that those experiences can’t dictate my actions any more, as long as I keep working to find a place I can feel safe, physically and mentally.

I have reached a point where I am afraid I can no longer compensate for my fears associated with this town. I have maintained a kind of plateau for a while, where I have been able to work at getting my feet on the ground while using coping techniques I learned in the hospital and in therapy and from other people, but I have run out of time trying to move forward in my recovery while still being here, where it all happened.

This trapped feeling is not good. When I am trapped, I check out in my mind – I dissociate. Completely. The scariest part of completely dissociating is that my body keeps on functioning separately from my brain, and I am so scared of whatever evil is still a part of me would do if I have no way of defending myself (or anyone else) against it.

That has always been one of my biggest fears, and I do get kind of nervous about it still – about the idea that I could just snap and do all kinds of weird and fucked up shit to all kinds of people without being consciously aware of what was happening.

The thing is, I’ve never attacked anyone or stolen anything or walked off a cliff or wandered down the street completely naked, while in a complete state of dissociation. These are things I have always been worried that I would do, but I haven’t done them.

Most of my dissociative states are not so completely removed from what is happening around me than an actual complete dissociative state. I am usually still with myself, though there are varying degrees of the level of being “present” at those times. I don’t know of a time when I was dealing with something life-threatening while completely dissociated.

My typical states of complete dissociation involve my simply spacing out – this actually happens a lot, but not for any extended amount of time (maybe ten minutes, at most). If I am driving, I will keep driving on autopilot, and just keep going and going until I snap out of it. This typically happens when I am on the interstate, or great lengths of highways or roads that don’t have any stop signs or traffic lights.

Stop signs and traffic lights, for some reason, usually bring me right back, but I have to look all around me and figure out where I am. This is not such a problem when I stay in areas I am VERY familiar with. At worst, I will come to a stop sign or traffic light, and have some sense that I am supposed to turn or something, and I can’t remember if I’ve already turned or not while I was totally zoned, and then I have to remember where it is that I am going, and I can “re-route,” just like the GPS on my phone.

The GPS on my phone is SO much better at re-routing, though, so I use it a lot when I am traveling more than a few miles from home, or to places I haven’t driven to hundreds of times.

Anyway, total dissociation episodes have typically involved things like sideswiping mailboxes, and coming to in the middle of a conversation and I have no idea what I’ve been talking about (once I was actually screaming at a group of my friends – scary), or I find myself putting a box of cereal in the refrigerator or throwing out real dishes and other things that are not trash.

I haven’t ever had a complete state of dissociation in which I snapped and started killing people. Even planning to kill my dad involved part of my conscious, present mind, which is why I was able to go to the hospital instead of going to actually kill him. That was a close one, though.

I think what happened when I had my “episode” last week was that I felt completely trapped, and tried to go back to my previous methods of dealing with it in my mind. While it was really nice to imagine that all of these horrendous people were dead, I felt much more burdened by the idea that I would have to kill them myself in order to achieve that. Thinking about killing them myself – as an independent thought – is not terribly disturbing – I am pretty sure that this is something that all people think about sometimes. When it gets entangled in my feeling trapped, though, it starts to feel more like a necessity of survival, and that’s when it gets kind of fucked up.

I don’t know – I have been surviving in this shit hole for my whole life. While the idea of having to remain here forever is devastating, I know I can survive being here. It’s just what I do. I survive.

I want so much to LIVE, though, and that just isn’t going to happen in this town.

part 119, or "is it real to anyone else yet?"

***TRIGGER ALERT***

I have corroborating evidence.

The pedophile next door to my childhood home also abused his own daughter. He has two daughters, but I only saw him abuse one. He demonstrated what he wanted to do to me on his youngest daughter, to show me that it was normal and okay. It was a very effective strategy. Except now I am a grown-up and remember shit, and now his daughter is a grown-up, too. I don’t know whether or not she remembers shit, but I was not that skeevy perve’s only victim. What he did to her corroborates my account of what he did to me. I also find it hard to believe that his wife had no knowledge or suspicions about him and what he did to little girls.

The pedophile diagonally to my childhood home also abused other people. He was even arrested for it years and years ago, but I don’t think any charges were filed, because I can’t dig up any records about that arrest. Regardless, these other victims do remember what happened to them, and their stories can corroborate my account of what that particular dirty old man did to me.

After that sick fuck across the street raped me (the first time), his wife was standing right there when I came up out of the basement and ran home. She saw me. She saw him. She knew what happened then, and she still knows it now. That corroborates what her husband did to me. I’m pretty sure my sister knows about this time, too – she was at home when I ran in the house, and she knew something was wrong, and I don’t remember anything else about her being there except that she had the most disgusted look on her face and I felt very dirty and shameful.

One of the things my dad and grandpa (his dad) did to me when I was about four or five was attempt to do a “female circumcision” on me. It was somehow related to their completely fucked beliefs/delusions about their cult/religion – I remember it being explained to me in a way I was supposed to accept as being “good” for me. They used wire snippers and they did cut me, but I was moving around a lot (because it hurt SO BAD!!!), and there was A LOT of blood, and they didn’t get to remove the organ they wanted to. They did leave a deep cut, though, and I have a scar from it. Only my husband and I have seen it, but still – it corroborates my account of what they did to me.

 My brother walked in the time my mom was sexually assaulting me as my dad looked on – we were in the kitchen, for christ’s sake. My brother swears he remembers nothing of this, but at the time he new something fucked up was going on, and insisted someone tell him what it was. When I alluded to what had actually happened, he told me I was very sick and his face looked very disgusted like that time my sister saw me after I was raped by the guy across the street. That corroborates my account of what my mom and dad did to me. That night was one of the times I cried and cried and cried, silently, until I wasn’t awake anymore, and in the morning the muscles in my back and abdomen were sore from all of the yelling I did in my head.

I also have reams of documentation about my psychological state – I’ve been evaluated many times over the years. (I was actually finally just formally diagnosed with a personality disorder – Avoidant Personality Disorder. Avoidant? Duh.) None of these evaluations mention or suggest that I have experienced or experience any delusions or hallucinations, and none of them mention or suggest that I am in any way not truthful.

And then there are the memories themselves – “recovered memories.” I remember the things that happened because I WAS THERE. I was a witness. I can provide more witness testimony-type of evidence than anyone would know what to do with. All I would have to do is say out loud what happened to me.

I’m sure there is more corroborating evidence that I have not thought to mention right now, but everything I’ve said in this blog post alone should be enough to open a formal investigation into these crimes.

Shouldn’t it? I mean, it should, right? I really do think it should. But it is hasn’t been enough, not up to this point, anyway.

Who knows? Maybe the shifting tides concerning victim testimony based on recovered memories will change something about my situation. Maybe the newly public acknowledgement that this shit DOES happen to kids every fucking day will change things.

Maybe. But I’m not holding my breath. 

part 118, or "stir it up, little darlin"

There is a website that is basically a database of information about recovered memories. It's called The Recovered Memory Project. I have it bookmarked, and about twice a year I look at it to see what's new. 


What's new right now is judgments against offenders based on the recovered memories of their victims, 20 to 30 years after the crimes occurred. 


One of the things people ask me repeatedly over the years is why I haven't reported the crimes committed against me when I was a kid. The answer is that I have reported those crimes, in person, to several local law enforcement agencies in several jurisdictions (including one out of the state of Georgia), the GBI, the FBI, two district attorneys, a number of police officers, and one superior court judge - in open court.


Some of them have investigated what I told them about things I witnessed my dad doing to other people, although as of yet, those cases have not gone anywhere. 


None of them - not one single one - ever investigated any of the crimes committed against me. Well, not that I am aware of, anyway.


There is a pedophile, a sadistic rapist, and a deranged evil bitch living less than a mile from me, and despite the information I have (quite publicly) been putting out there over the last two years in this blog, nothing has ever been done about that. 


The one thing I've heard several times is that because it happened so long ago, and there is little corroborating evidence, a serious and legitimate and valid investigation would not take place.


I've always truly believed that if I was able to testify in front of a jury about what these fucking pieces of shit did to me that I would be believed. The reason I believe this is because 1) it is the truth, and 2) my abusers are so clearly guilty in every mannerism they make and in every word they say that it would be impossible for any of them to provide any argument against me that anyone else might believe.


So I checked out the Recovered Memory Project a few minutes ago, and guess what? Abusers are being ruled against in civil actions based on the recovered memories of their victims. 


I've always thought that what I said happened to me amounted to some sort of evidence. I mean, "he-said, she-said" arguments are meant for a jury (or a judge) to decide, but those arguments don't ever get to a jury or a judge because even the local fucking police department won't do a thing to initiate any sort of real investigation into these people.


I mean, come ON. 


I don't have faith in cops, or in the law, or in the idea of "justice." I am too tired to keep trying to convince skeptical - and often mean - people with the power to do something that I am not crazy, AND that what happened to me was bad enough and IMPORTANT enough to warrant some sort of action on the part of law enforcement.


But this whole thing with the Sandusky case, and the guy who was acquitted of beating the shit out of a priest who molested him years before, and now these cases where the only evidence is the accounts of the victims and their recovered memories - that is something. I don't know what it is, but it really is something.


As much as I would love to trust anything will EVER happen to those sick fucks, I do not believe it will ever happen. But maybe, MAYBE, the current and former residents of my childhood home, and all of the current and former neighbors of my childhood home, might - MIGHT - be shitting themselves NOW, at least a little bit, at these recent developments in our society.


Because if I have the opportunity to realistically pursue legal action (civil or criminal) against anyone who ever touched me when I was a kid - or against anyone who didn't stop someone else from touching me when I was a kid - I am DEFINITELY taking the fuckers down.


I'm all out of fight to go at it alone, but the first chance anyone involved in the law backs me up, I am DEFINITELY taking the fuckers down.


In the mean time, I'm okay hoping they are losing sleep and pissing themselves night and day from the fear of how REALISTICALLY they can be exposed and prosecuted for what they did to me.


Fucking piece of shit animals - I will probably fall asleep tonight fantasizing about spitting in each and every one of their faces. 


Because I mean, SERIOUSLY - this shit is SO FUCKED UP.

part 117, or "stay gold, ponyboy"

Sometimes it just hurts so bad. It’s not an ache, or anything sharp, it’s just hurting.

I watched the movie Matilda today. I had never seen it before. It was just like me. Except Matilda had a much better head on her shoulders than I ever did as a child.

She looks just like my niece (the girl who plays Matilda). So does Suri Cruise. So do I. I miss her, really a lot. Its one of the bad things that come from making a decision like I did – I had a lot of really bad family, but they weren’t all bad, or even bad all the time.

I miss moments, like my mom and my sister and I all laughing. It is true I never felt completely comfortable around either one of them, and they seemed to sort of fuse together when we were all there, so that I still felt on the outside. And I know that my sister thinks I’m crazy or whatever, and that I’ve done horrible things to my mom and our family – and to her, and her girls. And I know that it’s better this way.

But as much as I remember hating and resenting and fearing my sister, I just miss her, too. Not so much my brother – it will probably take more than a year of not having anything to do with him before I start to miss him.

I wish they would believe me. I know that it is not the way things really are, but I wish so much that they could see me like who I am, and not like the picture that my parents always painted of me. There was A LOT of fighting, too – yelling and screaming and pulling hair and taking each other’s things – all three of us (my sister and brother and I) were awful to each other, and as much as I have felt my shame in all of that slipping away, I remember even more of how they treated me, too. It wasn’t just all me – and I feel like I should be mad and resentful towards them, but it is really just more hurting right now than any of that.

We were all in it together. I may have been hurt more, or exposed to more, or hated more, but all three of us were in it together. At least when we were really little. I remember that my dad would leave us in the van for long periods of time while he went into whatever building we were at so he could do whatever it was he was doing, and I don’t know how we did not kill each other.

I remember being isolated with them a lot – with my brother and sister – but I don’t remember ever fighting with either of them when were all left on our own in the same place, on the same level, by the same dad and the same mom.

I really, seriously do not ever remember getting along with them very well, either. Maybe I have just gotten to the point where I am remembering what it felt like to be attached to them on a primal level, as siblings. As people who had to get along because we would die if we didn’t.

We were hurt a lot together. I wonder if they remember any of that. I don’t think they do, but it seems like just being one year younger than me, my sister’s memories wouldn’t be too different from mine. I don’t know what the hell my brother’s memories are of – he probably has a mix of exultation and misery. Actually, I think all three of us share that. I was just more familiar with my sister’s exultation and misery because her exultation was almost always at my expense, and when she was miserable, it was okay because then she was being the bad kid.

One time my dad told her he was going to take her to the hospital to get the whine cut out. We all believed him. She would get rather terrified, and by then I would have kicked in to protective mode and tried to get her to just stop so they didn’t cut her throat open and remove the whine from her body. I wonder if either of them – my brother or my sister – remember how much I loved them and wanted to protect them.

Maybe they just remember me being mean and a bully, but they didn’t understand the things that could happen to them like I did.

Anyway, I remember being very protective of them, especially when we were really little, like all under the age of 7. Bad things happened to all of us, but I don’t think they remember much of that, if anything at all.

I think I am totally okay with them not remembering, and with being the one who got hurt the most, because imagining them having to live through what I’ve lived through, and go through what I’ve gone through just to keep living some more, it scared the ever-lovin-shit out of me. Their fear terrifies me – it always has.

I made my brother and sister mad a lot. I beat up on my brother a lot, and told my sister what to do a lot. But I could never handle seeing terror on their faces.

The idea of being separated from them used to scare the shit out of me, too. Not because I wanted to be around them, but because they needed me to protect them.

And then we were just all awful to each other, more and more as we got older. I do wonder if they will ever understand what I went through to keep them as safe as I could, when even I didn’t understand what I was doing. I hated it when my dad paid any attention to them, and I always whined and was obnoxious when he was paying attention to them and not to me. It wasn’t that I wanted his attention so much as it was knowing his attention on them put them in danger.

Jesus fucking christ – that man was an evil, sick, SICK bastard, and I don’t know if my sister and brother are even aware of just how sick and evil he was, even now after so much shit has come out in the open about him. I don’t think they could really know what I know about him, and about all the things that he could have done to them.

I suppose that would have been one more very deeply entrenched reason I was always so hateful and resentful toward them as we got older. They didn’t know what I had to go through, and they had no idea how much I truly believed I was taking on to keep it from happening to them.

Whatever. I’m tired of thinking about it. I just stopped crying, too, so no proof-reading on this one, I’m just going to post it; please forgive typos and disjointed thoughts or words.

It just hurts so fucking bad sometimes.